Prelude to the Cold War: Ideology and Geopolitics

Overview

Read: Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Read ch. 1, “The Empire of Liberty: American Ideology and Foreign Interventions,” pp. 8-38, and ch. 2, “The Empire of Justice: Soviet Ideology and Foreign Interventions,” pp. 39-72.

View: “From Coalition to Rivalry: The Soviet Union and United States at the Beginning of the Cold War,” (discussion by Frank Costigliola, Melvyn P. Leffler, and Philip Zelikow), Council on Foreign Relations, 4 November 2014; available online.

The Defeat of the Third Reich

Read: German Act of Surrender, 8 May 1945; and Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by the Allied Powers, 5 June 1945; in Documents on Germany, 1944-1961, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 11-17.

Alliance System and a Constructed Peace

Read: Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance Between the People’s Republic of Albania, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People’s Republic, the Rumanian People’s Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Czechoslovak Republic, 14 May 1955; available online.

Projecting the Worst

Read: Peter Bryant, Red Alert (New York: Ace, 1958).

Read: “Studies by Once Top-Secret Government Entity Portrayed Terrible Costs of Nuclear War,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 480, ed. William Burr; available online.

The Enemy at Home

Read: David R. Shumway, “Watching Elvis: The Male Rockstar as Object of the Gaze,” in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 124-143.

A (Second) Cold War

Read: Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011). Read ch. 5, “Noise from the Underground: Post-Punk Music, Culture, and Politics,” pp. 95-118.

View: Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on National Security,” 23 March 1983; available online.